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Social media, brain rot, and the slow death of reading

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My job as a book reviewer used to provoke envy at cocktail parties, where people fantasized about spending their lives reading. Now it’s more likely to elicit sheepish confessions from partygoers about not reading as much as they’d like, as if you’re giving them a pop quiz. Moby Dick.

Gone are the days when James Joyce Ulysses it was a magnet for the man, as the Irish novelist Anne Enright reminded me in a panel marking the book’s centenary in 2022. My own university bookshelf held a copy of David Foster Wallace’s 1,000-page book. infinite joke with similar objectives.

Nowadays, not even literature students read long books. Shakespeare scholar Sir Jonathan Bate, who teaches at universities in both the United States and the United Kingdom, recently lamented this decline. Forty years ago “you could tell a student, ‘This week it’s Dickens.’ Please read Great expectations, David Copperfield and gloomy house‘” he told BBC Radio 4. “Now, instead of three novels in a week, many students will struggle to read a novel in three weeks.”

A recent survey by the Reading Agency charity showed that only half of adults in the UK read regularly for pleasure, down from 58 per cent in 2015. More worryingly, 35 per cent are lay readers who used to enjoy of this hobby. My cocktail party confessors, among them novelists, tell me that they now find themselves browsing in bed instead of reading. And who can blame them? Social media is designed to hijack our attention with stimulation and validation in a way that makes it difficult for site technology to compete.

According to neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, author of Reader, come home: the reading brain in a digital worldWhile our brains are primed for language acquisition, they are not innately programmed to read; Reading is a skill that is learned. But brain plasticity works both ways: use it or lose it, and more and more we choose to lose it. The Oxford University Press word of 2024 was “brain rot,” meaning both the “low-quality, low-value content” found online and the intellectual decline due to its overconsumption. First recorded in Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book. WaldenThis year’s increase in usage is (ironically) attributed to references in TikTok videos.

By comparison, the easy dopamine hit that social media provides can make reading seem more exhausting. But the rewards are worth the extra effort: Regular readers report greater well-being and life satisfaction, benefiting from better sleep, focus, connection, and creativity. While just six minutes of reading has been shown to reduce stress levels by two-thirds, deep reading offers additional cognitive rewards of critical thinking, empathy, and self-reflection.

Ella Berthoud, bibliotherapist who offers personalized book “recipes” and co-author with Susan Elderkin of The novel cure: from A to Z of literary remediessays customers are increasingly looking for guidance on how to read more. To develop a reading habit, she recommends trying audiobooks, creating a reading corner for print books, and keeping a reading journal, since taking notes helps cement what you’ve read in your memory. For those looking to kill two New Year’s resolutions with one stone, Berthoud demonstrates the impressively coordinated feat of Hula-Hooping while reading.

If your reading muscle has atrophied, instead of delving directly into an annotated text UlyssesIt may be easier to start small with short stories or novellas, says Berthoud. Recent favorites include New Directions’ Storybook collection, designed to be read in one sitting, and books from Peirene, an independent publisher specializing in translated novellas.

While the fiction market is boosted by genres such as crime, fantasy and romance that are popular on BookTok (the influential reading community within TikTok), non-fiction sales have declined noticeably year over year. It is widely believed that non-fiction is easier to read, which has led to the rise of apps such as Blinkist, Headway and StoryShots, which offer summaries of books suspected to be largely AI-generated. But even putting aside issues of copyright and AI accuracy, reading isn’t just about efficiency. Good nonfiction offers not only information but also conversation: following an author’s thought process effectively trains our monkey mind to think.

My favorite nonfiction book this year (and an excellent antidote to brain rot) is by Edwin Frank. Stranger than fiction: lives of the 20th century novel. Covering 33 books with a bibliography of suggested further reading, it is both a way to exercise deep reading and a portal to re-engage with some of the greatest works in history.

Maria Popova, an author and essayist who started the literary website The Marginalian, once described literature as “the original Internet,” with every reference and footnote like “a hyperlink to another text.” The advantage is that you can get lost in this analog Internet without viral content jumping up and down screaming for your attention.

Even if the TikTok ban continues in the US, other platforms will emerge to replace it. So in 2025, why not replace the phone on your bedside table with a book? Just one hour a day of reclaimed screen time is roughly equivalent to one book a week, putting you among the elite one percent of readers. Melville (and a Hula-Hoop) are optional.

Mia Levitin is a critic and author of ‘The Future of Seduction’

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